Also in this report:

* Boomers love their papers: study p.B1

* Southam shifts under Black’s influence: Increasingly, the prevailing attitude is ‘every paper for itself’ – especially when it comes to advertising sales p.B2

* Community papers speaking from the heart: Joint campaign stresses weeklies’ emotional appeal p.B5

* Eaton’s uses newspaper to herald renewal p.B7

* Spotlight onÉNewspaper Creative p.B12

It’s Monday afternoon and Jeffrey Shearer is on the phone – standing, as he will be for much of the interview – looking out his office window toward the wall of skyscrapers along Toronto’s Front Street.

He’s explaining a new house ad to another executive at The Toronto Star. It says ‘Guess what news you won’t read in The Globe and Mail or The Toronto Sun?’ The ‘news’ is that recently-released NADbank figures put the Star’s readership up 11% over the previous year, at the expense of its two competitors.

As it happens, Shearer wrote the ad himself – a fair reflection of the hands-on style that he has exhibited since taking over last November as vice-president of marketing for Canada’s largest daily newspaper.

‘I’ve been in communications and marketing all my life,’ says Shearer, who came to the Star after nearly six years as publisher of Saturday Night magazine. ‘I like words. And I see myself as a media marketer – someone who likes to get directly involved, who doesn’t delegate and wait for something to happen. I’m a hands-on person and I work directly with the agencies and with our communications department to get the best possible result.’

When he took up his new post, Shearer faced a daunting challenge: namely, civilizing a media behemoth with a reputation for inflexibility – even arrogance – among advertisers and their agencies. In a hotly-contested newspaper market with no less than four dailies (if you count The Financial Post), that’s just not the kind of image one can afford to have any more.

At a time when newspaper circulation across North America is in decline, Shearer has sought to prod the paper out of the complacency that comes with being No. 1, and turn it into a friendly operation with which advertisers enjoy doing business.

‘We know that we’re a difficult organization to deal with,’ he says. ‘We know that we screw up. But we also know, based on industry research, that we’ve improved the perception of our salesforce in the marketplace over the last 12 months. But we’re still way too low, lower than we need to be.

‘We will always make mistakes, but what we’re getting better at is deciding how to change the process so that it will happen less.’

Shearer’s candor is reflected in the mea culpa tone of a recent trade press campaign created by Barry Base & Partners of Toronto. The ads, running in Strategy and other trade publications, use double-page spreads to paint the paper as a ‘Friendlier Giant’ – a large but nevertheless approachable organization. And Shearer has done his best to match the words with actions – holding weekly luncheons with ad agencies, for example, in order to hear their complaints and criticism.

Shearer says his overall strategy capitalizes on current trends in the medium. Even though newspapers generally have suffered a 2% to 3% drop in circulation over the past decade, most have moved from afternoon to morning print runs over that same period, opening up a larger ‘reading window.’

‘Afternoon papers had a reading window of about five hours, in what tv people would call prime time,’ Shearer explains. ‘But by coming out at six or seven in the morning, you’re offering a longer time frame in which to read. You’re also expanding the availability of the paper to other members of the family. So even though one section may go to the office and another may go somewhere else, readership hasn’t actually declined.’

Key among the Star’s tactics has been the leveraging of its liberal tradition and the perception that it ‘speaks for people, not institutions,’ he says.

By tinkering with its sectional structure and packaging information to target the interests of readers more sharply, the paper has also rendered itself more attractive to its audience, while offering advertisers more specific demographic reach.

Local news, for example, has been purged from the A section (except when it has national import) and grouped in its own section, leaving the upfront pages free for national and international news (normally The Globe and Mail’s territory). To offset any perception that local coverage has been de-emphasized, a new section called ‘Greater Toronto’ has been added to expand the paper’s coverage of suburban communities such as Mississauga, Brampton and Markham. The Op/Ed section has also been expanded – again, with a view to drawing more Globe readers.

Outstanding articles from each section are now being spun off each week in a series of ‘Best of’ samplers (Best of Sports, Best of Wheels, and so on) that serve as wraps for the Star’s mass weekend drop of flyers and inserts (which has a circulation of 932,000, versus 700,000 for the normal Saturday edition of the paper).

The ‘Best of’ series replaces the old ‘Weekend Star’ wrap – a light sampler of stories from the Saturday and Sunday papers that proved appealing neither to readers nor to advertisers.

Shearer says the circulation department loves the ‘Best of’ wrap ‘because it’s targeted to non-subscribers. Advertisers love it because it gives them another focused editorial product to reach specific audiences with. And for the editorial department, it’s a showcase of the best writing from each week. This, to me, is an opportunity to really market the newspaper, increase revenues and create a new circulation tool at the same time.’

On the magazine side, the Saturday Starweek tv listing now plans to include more feature articles, and will add more glossy pages to accommodate them. Ad rates for Starweek are also being lowered on an experimental basis, in an effort to drive greater volume.

The Star is extending its brand into other media as well. The recently-launched Toronto Star CitySearch Web site aims to become the city’s number one source of on-line visitor information. And Toronto Star Television (tstv), a new infomercial-format cable tv channel, is launching this month.

As yet, there’s no plan to offer advertisers combined packages that include all of these vehicles. The Star intends to sell each medium on its own strengths, Shearer says.

While the overall positioning for the Star may be friendlier, the paper’s going to be more aggressive on some fronts as well – especially when it comes to targeting the competition’s readers.

A case in point: The Friday, Oct. 10 issue of The Globe and Mail carries a full-page Toronto Star ad, part of a new consumer-targeted campaign (created by Enterprise Creative Selling of Toronto) that the Star launched in September. It’s a cheeky thrust of the marketing sabre, aimed squarely at the heart of the Globe’s readership.

‘There was some nervousness at first from the Globe, but they eventually agreed to run it,’ Shearer says. ‘The ad we’re running says, `If a tree falls in the Megacity, who’s there to hear?’ – which makes the point that the Globe’s coverage of Toronto is, perhaps, less than it ought to be.

‘After all, the Star does believe in the power of advertising in newspapers. So what better way to show it?’